The effect of UV irradiation on the refractive index modulation in photo-thermo-refractive glasses: Mechanisms and application

Abstract It is shown experimentally that in photo-thermo-refractive glasses the transformation of charged silver subnanosized molecular clusters to neutral state by UV irradiation results in the increase of glass refractive index. The increment of the refractive index reaches Δn = 0.76·10−4. Computer simulation has shown that the polarizability of neutral molecular clusters is by 20–40% larger than of charged ones. The reason of this is the increase of electron density and volume of electron density surfaces during the transformation of molecular cluster to the neutral state. The transition molecular cluster from the ground state to the excited state also results in the increase of its polarizability.